The Towers of Samarcand (17 page)

Luke smiled. ‘I promise.’

Surely it was a joke.

In strict translation from the Arabic,
Ablah
meant ‘perfectly formed’, but the camel beneath Luke was anything but that. It wasn’t so much the hump or even the supercilious face, which were much like any other camel’s. It was Ablah’s walk. It was distinctly uneven. Could it be, he wondered, that he was riding a camel whose left legs were shorter than its right?

It was now the fifteenth day since the caravan had left Yakub’s capital of Kutahya to go east across the steppe. For Luke, they’d been fifteen days of torture. What made it worse was the sight of his beloved Eskalon tethered behind, looking at him in relentless puzzlement. But Yakub had been firm: if he and his friends were to pass themselves off as servants to the merchant Abdul-Hafiz and his daughter Fatimah, then they must ride camels. And Eskalon, meanwhile, was to be a handsome horse for sale.

He’d spent the winter in Kutahya with his friends in great comfort. Yakub’s palace was spacious and draped in silk and they’d slept on scented goose-down and awoken each day to lutes and good food and fountains that played on to lily-pads.
The Germiyan capital was a busy trading centre on the road to the east, full of noise and colour and the flash of coin changing hands. Outside it, the beylik was mainly steppe and sky and passing caravan. Inside, it was a place where nations met and bartered. For Luke, each day had been another day of renewed friendship with his Varangian brothers and with Eskalon. They’d spent hours together in the saddle hunting or racing, Luke teaching them to ride and shoot like gazis. At night, they’d talk of what was to come and not always fall quickly into sleep.

Now they were on their way: the four of them, Shulen and Yakub. The gazi chief would accompany them as far as Tabriz where he was to treat with Qara Yusuf, Lord of the Black Sheep tribe, on behalf of his master, Bayezid.

Luke looked back towards where Shulen rode the Bactrian cousin to Ablah, a curtained howdah affixed to the space between its two humps in which she could rhythmically recline. Her only gripe was that she couldn’t see the world outside.

And the world outside was fair. Spring had come early to the steppe and the only hint of winter lay atop the peaks of mountains far to the south. The grasses were green and scattered with iris and poppy and the few trees they met oozed new sap from trunks scraped clean by deer. It was a land of lake and plateau and few towns or villages, of skies as big and as blue as oceans. It was a land in movement. The rivers they met were full and fierce and leaping with fish to be speared and cooked later in camel-milk. Goats and sheep were everywhere, herded by boys who smiled, beneath hands, up at the long, long thread of camels swaying their measured way across the endless steppe.

Luke turned to look at the line of camels, perhaps five hundred of them, stretching into the distance. Each was roped
to the one in front and collected in files of eight, their puller at their head. On either side of them merchants, herders, cooks, musicians, storytellers, snake charmers, guards and everything else that made up this nomadic circus walked or rode. And next to them ran the dogs that would protect their camps at night. For fifteen days they’d stopped only to sleep and pray.

He drew up beside Abdul-Hafiz. The merchant was riding a horse largely smothered by the many folds of his cotton
thoub
. Without the garment he would have been large; with it, he was colossal. Luke knew that he came from Andalucía in Spain but had not been home for many years. This caravan, one of many he owned, had started in Bursa and was bound, via Kutahya, for Samarcand.

‘Master,’ began Luke, using the term agreed, ‘how is it that a camel with legs of unequal length can be called Ablah? Is it a joke?’

Abdul-Hafiz looked at Luke, then Yakub, and grinned between the shores of his explosive beard. His teeth were not of the same white as his thoub. ‘Call it what you will, my boy,’ he replied amicably. ‘Do you have a better name?’

Luke did. It had been given him by a man who had lied to him. ‘Aatirah?’

The merchant’s grin widened and he looked across at the camel. The cavernous laugh that had rumbled up and down the caravan for two weeks was rising from its depths.

‘Your camel is well known to shit often and everywhere, Luke. Its dung alone is enough to cook our food every night. Your camel stinks.’

Yakub leant across from his saddle as the merchant exploded in laughter. ‘Aatirah means fragrant, Luke.’

Luke nodded, patting the animal’s neck. He’d stay with
Ablah. ‘When do we reach the border?’ he asked.

‘We reach the lands of the Qara Koyunlu tomorrow,’ said the fat merchant, wiping the last tear from his eye. ‘Tonight we stop at a caravanserai.’

In fact they had yet to stop at a caravanserai since their route had been unusual. Among the many nations represented in the caravan there were merchants from Venice who traded in horses. They had wanted to travel due east to the beylik of Dulkadir, which was famed for its stallions, and Yakub had agreed since it had given him a chance to look in on its ruler, Nasredin Mehmed, whose daughter Emine was being considered as a match for the Sultan’s second son, Mehmed.

‘You want to watch your horse,’ said Abdul-Hafiz, jabbing his thumb in the direction of Eskalon. ‘I’ve seen the Venetians looking at it.’

Luke looked back at Eskalon.

‘And I would never trust a Venetian,’ continued the merchant. He winked and tapped the side of his nose. ‘Dark people who live on water.’

There was a shout from in front of them and a message was passed from puller to puller. A man pointed to the west where a long haze of grey hung on the horizon. Ablah stopped suddenly, snarled and buried her nose in the grass. Abdul-Hafiz glanced down at the camel. ‘
Waa faqri
,’ he muttered. Then he heaved himself up to stand in his stirrups, shielding his eyes with his big hand. ‘A sandstorm is coming. We need to get to the caravanserai.’

*

That night, the four Varangians, Shulen and Abdul-Hafiz sat around a fire within the walls of the caravanserai listening to the wind moaning outside. They were in a vast open courtyard,
surrounded by stables and storerooms, with towers at its corners where soldiers crouched beneath ramparts. It was a place of roasting mutton and refuge.

They had hurried inside just as the wind had begun to hurl the debris of the steppe against its walls and the merchants had gone to the little mosque to give thanks to Allah. The camels had been led to the warehouses and the Varangians had wandered through the halls to watch the wares being laid out for checking.

It seemed as if an ark had parked at this oasis and disgorged a version of everything that was precious from the world outside. There was ceramics and glass from Venice, sable and fox-fur from the lands of the Golden Horde, jewelled ostrich eggs cradled all the way from Addis Ababa and damasks from Cyprus, finer than any Luke had seen on Chios. Later, they sat around a fire with Abdul-Hafiz and talked of trade.

The merchant drew the world he’d travelled on a stone using a piece of chalk. Then, winking at Luke and dabbing the rolls of his glistening chins with a handkerchief, he drew what looked like the veins of a leaf inside the boundaries of his world.

‘I call it the Silk Road,’ he said, ‘but it’s not a single road and it carries more than silk. It is said that the road began when the wife of the Yellow Emperor watched a cocoon fall from a mulberry tree into her tea and unravel before her very eyes. Soon the Romans wanted silk for their togas and the road ran all the way from Chang’an to Rome, which they called Daqin: six thousand miles to the west, or two years’ travel.’

He paused and his fat finger hovered closer to the map. ‘Rich cities sprang up along the way, cities like Palmyra which were built on oases and could tax merchants for water and safety. Between them were built caravanserai twenty miles apart
which was the distance a camel could walk in a day.’

Abdul-Hafiz pointed to the arteries spreading out from the spine. ‘But soon the road had many branches. Ivory and gold came up from Africa and frankincense from the sands of Arabia. And from India’ – he paused to wipe his brow with his hand – ‘came wonderful things. Pearls as white as snow from the Kingdom of Maabar. They fish for them there in the seas south of Bettala where the Brahmin priests are said to hypnotise the sharks for one-twentieth part of their value.’

The fat man chuckled at the thought. He looked up to see Arcadius frowning. ‘You don’t believe me?’ he asked, pointing his stick. ‘My family has been travelling this road since the birth of Allah. There is nothing we haven’t seen.’

‘Please, Abdul-Hafiz,’ said Luke, ‘please continue.’

The merchant looked around and, satisfied that his audience was rapt, went on. ‘Yes, from India. Wonderful things. The King of Ceylon owned a ruby as big as a man’s fist without a single flaw. Kublai Khan offered him the value of a city but he wouldn’t sell. My father once saw a diamond like this’ – he made a circle between his thumb and forefinger – ‘which came from the Hindoo Kingdom of Mutifili on the Coromandel coast. They use eagles there to find them, throwing meat into gorges so that they swoop down and swallow them. Then they pick them out of their shit. Ha!’

Shulen’s finger was tracing the route, the back of her hand soft in the firelight, her eyes aglow. ‘And what would you see?’ she murmured. ‘What would you see on this Silk Road?’

Abdul-Hafiz smiled, scratching his beard with the end of the stick and waving away a spark from his cheek. He seemed to Luke like a fat camel in the firelight: the same lazy hooded eyes and crooked smile. He wondered if that happened, over time,
to all caravan merchants.

‘You would see great cities,’ murmured the merchant. ‘Like Tabriz in Persia, where we will arrive before the next moon.’

Matthew leant forward to look at the stone. ‘And after Tabriz?’

‘After Tabriz, more cities of a size and wealth unimaginable to you from the West. Damascus, Baghdad, Bokhara, Samarcand. And huge rivers like the Oxus that take a day to cross. And then there are the deserts. You know what Taklamakan means? The desert east of Kashgar?’ He paused. ‘It means
go in and you’ll never come out
. It is a desert of ghosts.’

The Varangians looked at each other.

‘Oh, and the fierce animals,’ he continued, warming to the theme. ‘I shouldn’t forget the lions and leopards, and the wolves in the wild Alburz Mountains. We lose many camels along the way. Even good Muslims sometimes.’

‘And bandits?’ asked Nikolas, his eyes wide. ‘Are there robbers along the way?’

The merchant shook his head. ‘No. That’s one good thing about the Mongols,’ he replied. ‘Genghis and his sons made the trade routes safe. They even exterminated the assassins from the lands east of Tabriz who used to fall on caravans from their mountain castles, fired up by that
hashish
they smoked.’ He paused. ‘They say that a virgin can travel from Tabriz to Chang’an carrying a ruby on a golden plate and not be molested.’

‘But before Tabriz?’

‘Before Tabriz we will be travelling through the lands of the Qara Qoyunlu, which were overrun by Tamerlane ten years ago. Now they’ve been taken back by Qara Yusuf and there is less order. But our caravan is large. We’ll be safe until Samarcand.’

They were silent for a while and let their various thoughts
rise into the night where the wind gathered them up and carried them away along the road to the land of the Ming. Luke looked down at the sword in his lap. He hadn’t thought it prudent to carry it on the ride and even now, only the hilt could be seen. The dragon eyes glowed up into his. There was a cough behind them.

An old man was watching them from the shadows. He was short and neat in every visible respect. His eyes were part of a smile that began in the creased curve of his bearded chin. He seemed happy to see them.

‘Abdul-Hafiz,
salaam
,’ said the man, stepping forward. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’

The merchant stood and held out his arms: ‘Ibn Khaldun!’ he exclaimed, his smile a melon slice. ‘You are here!’

‘Apparently so,’ agreed the man, moving into the embrace. ‘I join you yet again. The conversation is irresistible.’

The merchant threw back his head and laughed, his many chins jostling with pleasure.

‘And your friends?’ asked the stranger.

‘Ah yes …’ The merchant turned and glared at the Varangians who were still seated. He held out his hand to Shulen. ‘Yes. Well, I don’t believe I ever told you that I had a daughter.’ Abdul-Hafiz indicated Shulen, who had covered her face with her veil. ‘May I present to you the Lady Fatimah?’

Ibn Khaldun looked amazed. ‘Well now, how long have we known each other?’ he asked, bowing deeply in the direction of Shulen, his hands pressed together. ‘And in all that time you have never mentioned a daughter. Allah forgive you for such modesty! Does your wife know of this lady?’